Humans

By Chris Stokel-Walker
People from ethnic minority backgrounds in Switzerland were less likely to be contacted about jobs
Yagi Studio/Getty Images

People from ethnic minority groups are less likely to be contacted by job recruiters than people from the majority group, according to an analysis of users on a Swiss public employment website.
Dominik Hangartner of ETH Zurich in Switzerland and colleagues studied the actions of more than 43,000 recruiters who conducted 450,000 searches of 17.4 million jobseekers’ profiles between March and December 2017. They tracked every click to see how recruiters interacted with the profiles, which include information on ethnicity, age and nationality inserted by case workers at the Swiss national employment agency, similar to Job Centre Plus in the UK.
How often Swiss nationals born in the country and from the majority ethnic group were contacted by recruiters was used as the baseline for the analysis, with the probability of recruiters clicking a button to contact job applicants based on ethnicity calculated relative to that. The team found that people from immigrant and ethnic minority groups were up to 19 per cent less likely to be contacted.

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Recruiters spent only 0.3 seconds less, on average, on profiles of ethnic minority jobseekers, which the researchers say means the result cannot be entirely explained by recruiters consciously discriminating against people based on ethnicity.
But the time recruiters spent on a person’s profile varied depending on the time of day: between 9am and 10am, they spent 10.5 seconds on average per profile, and 12 per cent less time on those from jobseekers from minority ethnic backgrounds. Between 5pm and 6pm, they spent 9.5 seconds on the average profile, and 14.7 per cent less on ethnic minority accounts. Similar variations are found just before lunch breaks. The team found no significant difference based on the gender of applicants for the average job.

“Around 20 per cent of the anti-[ethnic minority] discrimination we see is driven by the time of day, when arguably recruiters are more exhausted and tired,” says Hangartner. The discrimination is calculated by monitoring the amount of time spent on individual profiles, and the likelihood of being contacted by recruiters. He thinks the rest of the discrimination may be unconscious bias that particularly rears its head when users are tired.
“This is the kind of data analysis that shows us racial discrimination is still a deeply entrenched practice,” says Safiya Umoja Noble of the University of California, Los Angeles. “What we need is rigorous monitoring of systems to ensure such systems do not make discrimination even more opaque.”
Hangartner hopes the data can be used to redesign such websites to mitigate the impact of implicit bias against people from ethnic minority groups.

Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-03136-0

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Stress levels of burned-out parents can be higher than those of people in extreme pain, according to research by Moira Mikolajczak. She tells New Scientist why the pandemic has brought new urgency to her work

Humans 20 January 2021
By Jessica Hamzelou

Rocio Montoya

“A STATE of vital exhaustion.” This is a surprisingly poetic description of burnout by the World Health Organization. Burnout – severe exhaustion caused by uncontrolled chronic stress – is increasingly becoming the focus of health research. It was originally identified as a work-related phenomenon, but now a form that affects parents is coming under the spotlight.
Any parent can relate to the fatigue associated with looking after a child. But for some parents, that tiredness can tip into harmful exhaustion, leaving them physically unwell and damaging their relationships with their children and partners.
Moïra Mikolajczak at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL) in Belgium has been at the forefront of research into parental burnout. Over the past five years, she and her colleagues have found that it isn’t something that just affects parents of ill children – it can affect any parent, although it is more likely to affect highly educated people who are perfectionists and put too much pressure on themselves.
Since Mikolajczak began studying the phenomenon, the field has expanded. A consortium of researchers she launched a few years ago to investigate parental burnout now has 90 members. The advent of covid-19 lockdowns, which have led to many parents juggling childcare with homeworking, has made the research more relevant and the need to understand this condition more urgent, says Mikolajczak. She tells New Scientist which factors can tip parents over the edge and how all parents can help protect themselves from extreme exhaustion.
Jessica Hamzelou: What is parental burnout?
Moïra Mikolajczak: Parental burnout is like any burnout. It’s an exhaustion disorder, but takes place in the parental … More

The forces fighting climate science have not been defeated, just changed tactics. But Michael Mann, a key figure in the fightback, argues for hope in his new book

Humans 19 January 2021
By Richard Schiffman

MOST people accept that climate change is happening, but that doesn’t mean the war against climate science is over. The denialists have just changed their tactics, argues Michael Mann in his book The New Climate War.
Mann should know. A climatologist at Penn State University, he has been a target since his “hockey stick” graph was published in 1999. The graph shows the rapid rise in temperature globally since industrialisation caused heat-trapping carbon dioxide to spew into the atmosphere.
This dramatic visual, featured in Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, earned Mann decades of harassment and death threats. This was part of a war against climate research that has been waged since the 1970s, first to cover up and then to contest the growing evidence that shows our planet is warming.
However, as data about rising sea levels, higher temperatures and megafires mounted, the climate sceptics shifted to “a kinder, gentler form of denialism”, says Mann. They now mostly concede that, yes, there is some warming and human activity plays some role, but it’s not nearly as bad as those “alarmist” scientists say.
This new effort (bankrolled by the same polluting interests that funded the old one) no longer disputes climate change, but tries to block the action needed to move towards a low-carbon future. It is being fought by the successors to climate change denialists, who Mann calls the “inactivists”. They lobby against effective carbon pricing programmes and subsidies for renewable energy that would imperil big energy’s bottom lines.

According to Mann, central to this strategy is a campaign to shift culpability for climate change from the corporations selling fossil fuels to those who use them. Fossil fuel companies aren’t to blame, “it’s the way people are living their lives”, Chevron argued in court in 2018.
“Doomism and the loss of hope can lead people down the very same path of inaction as outright denial”
Some environmentalists have bought into this argument. While Mann agrees it is good to eat less meat, travel less and recycle more, such actions alone aren’t enough. We need to decarbonise the economy, he says. Focusing on personal responsibility takes our eyes off that prize.
Another thing inactivists do, Mann says, is to support divisive films like Michael Moore’s recent documentary Planet of the Humans that purported to show that renewable energy is ineffective and polluting.
The film was condemned by environmental activists and climate scientists. But the pro-fossil fuel American Energy Alliance spent thousands to promote a film it hoped would take the wind out of the sails of the push for clean energy.
“Doomism and the loss of hope,” writes Mann “can lead people down the very same path of inaction as outright denial. And Michael Moore plays right into it.” Despair is counterproductive.
Fossil fuel interests also cynically push “non-solution solutions” like natural gas, carbon capture and geoengineering, whose inadequacies Mann details. Again, the effort is to distract from the real task of weaning the world off fossil fuels.
But in the end, Mann says he is optimistic, heartened by the upswell of youth activism and the rapid development of green technologies. Even investors are beginning to flee from fossil fuels. Moreover, botched responses to covid-19 underline the peril of ignoring science and failing to act.
With the major COP26 UN climate summit due to be held later this year in Glasgow, UK, Mann’s call to get serious about climate change couldn’t be more timely. Let’s hope he is right that the tide is finally about to turn.
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By Ibrahim Sawal
An ancient picture showing three pigs may be the oldest drawing of animals in the world
AA Oktaviana

Stunning cave paintings discovered in Indonesia include what might be the oldest known depictions of animals on the planet, dating back at least 45,000 years.
The paintings of three pigs, alongside several hand stencils, were discovered in the limestone cave of Leang Tedongnge on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Even local people were unaware of the cave sites’ existence until their discovery in 2017 by Adam Brumm at Griffith University, Australia, and his team.
“I was struck dumb,” says Brumm. “It’s one of the most spectacular and well-preserved figurative animal paintings known from the whole region and it just immediately blew me away.”

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Sulawesi is known to contain some of the world’s oldest cave art, but the new paintings may predate all other examples so far discovered on the island.

Brumm and his colleagues used a technique called uranium-series dating to analyse a mineral formation that overlapped part of the image, and that must have formed after the cave art was produced. The mineral formation is at least 45,500 years old, suggesting the artwork itself could be much older.
“It adds to the evidence that the first modern human cave art traditions did not arise in ice age Europe, as long assumed, but at an earlier point in the human journey,” says Brumm.
Each of the three pigs is more than a metre long. The images were all painted using a red ochre pigment. They appear to be Sulawesi warty pigs (Sus celebensis), a short-legged wild boar that is endemic to the island and is characterised by its distinctive facial warts. “This species was of great importance to early hunter-gatherers in Sulawesi,” says Brumm.

These pigs appear in younger cave art across the region, and archaeological digs show that they were the most commonly hunted game species on Sulawesi for thousands of years. “The frequent portrayal of these wild pigs in art offers hints at a long-term human interest in the behavioural ecology of this local species, and perhaps its spiritual values in the hunting culture,” says Brumm.

Paul Pettitt at Durham University, UK, agrees that the discovery adds to evidence of human presence in the islands of south-east Asia. Early humans presumably crossed these islands to reach Australia – perhaps as early as 65,000 years ago – after migrating out of Africa.
But Pettitt says: “Given the insufficient amount of human fossils in the region at this time, we cannot, of course, rule out authorship by another human species, like the Neanderthals [that] were producing non-figurative art in Europe.”
Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abd4648
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In Second Spring, an archaeologist who has developed a lesser-known form of dementia that alters her personality, unmasks her new life – to the dismay of friends and family More

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Inscape is Louise Carey’s first solo novel: a science fiction tale of near-future corporate surveillance in which a young soldier is sent to discover the source of an attack on her home, and gets more than she bargained for.

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Vikings are rarely portrayed as a civilized people, but new game Assassin’s Creed Valhalla has it both ways with people playing nice while still overrunning everything in sight, says Jacob Aron

Humans 13 January 2021
By Jacob Aron
There is action in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, but harming civilians is off-limits
Ubisoft

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
Ubisoft Montreal
PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One, Series X and S, Google Stadia
VIKINGS have undergone a bit of a rebrand of late. Once seen as violent barbarians, rampaging in horned helmets across Europe, we are increasingly finding evidence that they were an advanced, civilised people with everything from frozen food to navigational crystals.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the latest in the historical action series, seems to want it both ways. You play as a Viking called Eivor (male or … More

Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity…”
We are just a couple of weeks into 2021 and yet that famous opening from Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities has never rung truer. On the one hand, we are seeing the roll-out of effective vaccines against a disease that little more than a year ago was unknown to science – a stunning tribute to human wisdom, and … More